I like gossip as much as the next (wo)man. The leaks provide a lot of it, interspersed with some real information.

But there is nothing really new there. The information only
confirms what any intelligent person could have worked out already. If
there is anything new, it's exactly this confirmation: the world is
really managed the way we thought it was. How depressing.

Four hundred years ago, Sir Henry Wotton, a British diplomat,
observed that "An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for
the good of his country." Since then, nothing has changed except that
the ambassador has been joined by the ambassadress. So it is quite
refreshing to listen to what they say in secret messages home, when
they don't have to lie.

That said, let's move on to more important things.

The elections in Egypt, for example.

Years ago, the story goes that a Soviet citizen went to the
polling station on election-day and was handed a sealed envelope to put
into the ballot box.

This could not happen in Egypt. First of all, because
Egyptians are a very humorous people. If told that their elections were
secret, they would burst out laughing.

Second, because they so obviously are not.

On one of my visits to Anwar Sadat's Cairo, I had the chance
to witness an election day. It was a jolly occasion, more a medieval
carnival than a solemn fulfillment of democratic duty. Everybody was
happy.

Visiting a polling station in a village near the Giza
pyramids, I was struck by this atmosphere of jolly cynicism. No one
even pretended that it was serious. Good-humored soldiers guarding the
locale volunteered to help old women in choosing the right ballot and
putting it in the envelope.

I am not sure whether this good humor has been retained under
the Mubarak regime, but the results are the same. Media editors, all
appointed by the government, prevent any criticism of the government.
Opposition activists are arrested well before election day (if they are
not in prison already). The government party is a sorry joke. No one
seriously pretends that the country is anything but a dictatorship. The
upper classes like it that way, not only out of fondness for their
privileges but also out of a genuine fear that under democracy, their
country would elect a fundamentalist religious regime, with burqas and
all.

All over the Arab world, this is a real dilemma. Free elections would bring fundamentalists to power.

During the last century, secular nationalism was in vogue. In
many Arab countries, nationalist movements sprang up. Their model was
the great Ataturk --- a revolutionary renovator as no other. He
suppressed Islam, forbade the fez for men and the hijab for women,
replaced the Arabic with the Latin script, fostered Turkish nationalism
instead of the Ottoman Islamism.

This, by the way, was a model for many of us, who aspired to
replace the Jewish religion and Zionist pseudo-nationalism with a
healthy Hebrew territorial secular nationalism. The son of Eliezer
Ben-Yehuda, the renovator of the modern Hebrew language, also proposed
replacing the Hebrew script with a Latin one.

In Turkey, the Ataturk revolution is now threatened by the
upsurge of a rejuvenated Islam. In Israel, the new Hebrew nation is
under siege by a fundamentalist, aggressive Judaism. All over the Arab
world, the situation is worse.

To put it bluntly: secular nationalism has not delivered. It
has brought no real independence, no freedom, no economic and
technological breakthrough.

In the economic sphere, no Arab country has succeeded in doing
what has been done by Japan, South Korea and even Malaysia, and what is
being done now by China and India. The successful Israeli example is
near at hand and increases the frustration.

The dream of a secular pan-Arab union, as envisioned by Gamal
Abd-al-Nasser and the original Ba'athists, is in tatters. So is the
dream of Arab independence. Almost all Arab countries are backward
American clients and dance to the American tune. A whole generation of
Arab leaders has spectacularly failed.

The most recent example was Yasser Arafat. He created a
Palestinian national movement that was proud of its non-sectarianism.
Christian Arabs played a significant role in the Palestine Liberation
Organization. George Habash was a Christian physician from Ramallah,
the Christian Hanan Ashrawi is one of the most articulate Palestinian
spokespersons.

Arafat himself was a practicing Muslim. Often, even in private
conversations, he would excuse himself, disappear for a few minutes and
return unobtrusively, while his assistants would whisper to us that the
Ra'is was praying. Yet he never tired of assuring everyone that the
future State of Palestine would be free of any religious domination.

As long as he was alive, political Islam remained a minor influence, and not because of any repressive measures.

All this is history. The Sunni Hamas ("Islamic Resistance
Movement") and the Shiite Hezbollah ("Party of God") are becoming the
models for masses of young people all over the Arab world.

One of the major reasons for this is Palestine.

If Arafat had succeeded in founding the free and sovereign
State of Palestine, the texture of Arab politics would have changed,
not only in Palestine itself but in all Arab countries.

The rise of Hamas in Palestine is a direct result of this
failure. Secular Palestinian nationalism has been given a try, and has
failed. The Islamic revolutionaries are appealing to a people deprived
of all national and human rights, with no alternative in sight.

As the Wikileaks show (here I go, mentioning them after all)
not one single Arab regime gives a damn about the Palestinians. That is
nothing new --- indeed, Arafat created his movement, Fatah
("Palestinian Liberation Movement"), in order to liberate the
Palestinians, first of all, from the cynical Arab regimes, all of which
exploited the "Palestinian Cause" for their own ends.

But the depth of cynicism revealed in these conversations
between Arab potentates and their American masters borders on outright
betrayal. This will increase the already massive frustration not only
in Palestine, but in all Arab countries. Any young Egyptian, Jordanian,
Saudi or Bahraini (to mention only a few) must be acutely aware that
his country is led by a small group for whom the preservation of their
personal power and privileges is vastly more important than the holy
cause of Palestine.

This is a deeply humiliating insight. It may not produce
immediate results, but when hundreds of millions of people feel
humiliated, the effects are foreseeable. The older generation may be
used to this situation. But for young people, especially proud Arabs,
it is intolerable.

I am very sensitive to this kind of feeling, because at the
age of 15 I felt the same and joined the "terrorist" Irgun ("National
Military Organization"). I just could not stand the sight of my leaders
kowtowing before the British rulers of my country. Putting myself in
the shoes of a young Arab of similar age now in Jeddah, Alexandria or
Aleppo, I can just imagine what he feels. Even Ehud Barak, that veteran
Arab-fighter, once said that if he were a young Palestinian, he would
join a terrorist organization.

Sooner or later, the situation will explode --- first in one
country, then in many. The fate of the Shah of Iran should be
remembered by those who speak --- in secret documents --- about the
"Iranian Hitler" who is on the verge of obtaining a nuclear bomb.

The frustration about Palestine is the immediate cause of this
humiliation, being manifest for all to see, but the feeling itself goes
beyond one single cause.

Secular nationalism has signally failed the Arabs. Communism
has never taken root in the Islamic world, being by its very nature
inimical to the basic tenets of Islam. Capitalism, while attractive to
some, has also failed to solve any of the basic problems of the Arab
world.

The Islamic revolutionary movement in its many forms promises
a viable alternative. It is no fluke that the Egyptian dictatorship
forbids the use of the slogan "Islam is the solution" --- the simple
and effective slogan that unites the Islamic opposition in all the
countries. There is a gaping vacuum in the Arab world, with no one
there to fill it --- except Islamism.

For the United States, this is a huge challenge. Obama seemed
to have perceived it, before he was swallowed --- head and body --- by
the American political routine.

Everybody seems to be talking about the Decline of the
American Empire. It's all the rage. What's happening in the Arab world
may accelerate or slow this process. The creation of a sovereign, free
and viable State of Palestine --- with the electrifying effect this
would have throughout the Arab region, indeed the entire Islamic world
--- would slow it considerably.

Judging from these leaks, this seems very far from the minds of American statesmen and stateswomen, such as they are.

For Israel, the outlook is even grimmer. The prospect of a
fundamentalist Arab world, with a completely new and popular set of
leaders, surrounding us on all sides, with the power of America (and
its Jewish lobby) declining ever more, is a frightening prospect indeed.

If I were responsible for Israel at this moment, I would worry about this much more than about the Iranian bomb.

Fortunately, this is not an inescapable danger. Israeli policy
can do a lot to avert it. Unfortunately, we are doing the exact
opposite.

To those who chant "Islam is the solution," our answer should be: "A just peace is the solution."